Nurturing the Nation: Normal Schools and the Professionalization of Teaching in Nineteenth-Century Boston and Buenos Aires

“Nurturing the Nation: Normal Schools and the Feminization of Teaching in Nineteenth-Century Boston and Buenos Aires"

My study focuses on the role that female teachers played within 19^th-century education systems in Boston and Buenos Aires, and in US and Argentine national projects. The history of normal schools shows gender as an integral component of nation building in both countries: female teachers idealized as nurturing, gentle, and maternal rapidly became the most prevalent human resource in public education. In the 1820s in the US, and in the 1850s in Argentina, women overcame occupational restrictions to become teachers and educational administrators in record numbers. This participation transcended contemporary conceptions of gender and political roles, even ones touted by liberal intellectuals. Taking a central role in normal schools, women educators became key links between the home and the state.

My work proposes a nuanced look into the lives of women in the 19^th-century Americas. Contrary to what the existing literature proposes, nation-building processes in Argentina and the US were stages of change framed within the language of tradition. Horace Mann and Domingo Sarmiento, main promoters of the feminization of teaching in their respective countries, reached to the colonial past—using terms like Queens, Monarchy, and motherhood—to justify that women would be subsidized and hired by the republican state to teach the young. Placing teachers’ daily activities within the environment of the Normal Schools at the center of my analysis, I contribute to the literatures on the intersection between the nation-state and the family and the role of gender in shaping the construction and evolution of modern institutions. To do so, my work recreates the development of Boston’s Lexington Normal School under Cyrus Pierce (1839) and the Escuela Normal de Maestras de la Provincia de Buenos Aires under Emma Nicolay de Caprile (1874).